Particular embodiments are in the technical field of networking technology. More particularly, particular embodiments are in the technical field of computer and embedded device communications.
The Internet and home entertainment devices usually do not communicate with one another. Attempts have been made to bridge these two: game consoles communicate over the Internet so allowing many players to engage in the same game, Apple TV downloads videos from iTunes, Microsoft media extenders play media housed on a user's personal computer. The dominant paradigm is to extend the home entertainment device so that users can search the Internet or nearby computers from the device. Less has been done to extend the PC to push content to the entertainment device.
Set-top boxes exist that stream videos from websites to the TV. The set-top boxes all assume the user sits in front of the TV when navigating between videos. Due to the limitations of TV remote controls, no acceptable user interface has been devised to enable users to hunt through catalogs of thousands of titles. Computers have the advantage of a keyboard and mouse: rich input devices that have performed well for inputting queries to web search engines and video web sites. An entertainment system might exploit the advantages of the computer to push the most relevant content to the TV leaving the home entertainment user interface to handle the smaller problem of hunting through tens or hundreds of titles.
In the case of a joint venture between Amazon and TiVo, a user of Amazon Unboxed can click on a purchased video and it is then downloaded to the user's TiVo Internet-equipped digital video recorder. The TiVo then plays the video directly to the user's TV. NetFlix has a similar arrangement with Roku. However, both products require user configuration and a pre-existing user registration, e.g., for Amazon/TiVo the user must have an account that is linked to the user's TiVo account which is associated with the user's TiVo. The Amazon-TiVo relationship is explicit and does not extend beyond Amazon to other websites. The “click to send” to your TiVo functionality is an example of extending the computer to push content to a device over a network.